With only 25 days left until the release of Sustainable Brand Index 2015 it is our pleasure to introduce Sustainable Throwback Thursday! Every Thursday until the 23rd of March we will publish a blog post analyzing interesting facts from the previous four indexes. Will this year’s index be similar to last year’s? Find out on the 23rd!

When looking at the indexes from the last three years it is clear that consumers tend to be a bit partial towards brands that originate from their own countries, at least in Sweden, Norway and Finland. In the Swedish indexes, every industry leader has been Swedish apart from Google that managed to top the tech-industry in 2013 and 2014 and The Body Shop that topped the retail-industry in 2014. In Finland and Norway we can see the same pattern; the first 14 brands in the Finnish index in 2014 were all Finnish and the Norwegian indexes are also dominated by Norwegian brands.

In Denmark the situation is slightly different. Danish brands still score high, but Swedish and German brands also mangage to compete. In 2013 the Danish index was topped by Swedish IKEA. This tiny difference might have an historic explanation. Sweden, Norway and Finland have a long history of national large-scale companies whilst Denmark, situated on the European continent has a long history of trade with its neighbors. This could be a reason why Swedes, Norwegians and Finns put less trust in the sustainability of foreign products than the Danes.

Is this changing? In the past two years companies such as Google and The Body Shop have managed to break the trend. Perhaps foreign brands will rank higher in this year’s index?

Stay tuned, the next Sustainable Throwback Thursday will be published next Thursday!